Radio Free Asia

Sr. Network & Software Engineer, Technical Operations

• Involvement in a wide range of Linux systems and IP network deployment and management efforts as well as software development of internal and external web applications to support RFA's mission of delivering uncensored news and information in nine native Asian languages: Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean, Tibetan, Uyhgur, Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer, and Burmese.
• Developed an integrated system for segmenting and transmitting RFA's live broadcast channels via HTTP live streaming using opensource tools. The platform picks up Axia IP Audio live broadcast sources on a Windows virtual machine running on a CentOS KVM host, which is then served with Icecast. A Linux Ubuntu guest VM running ffmpeg takes the Icecast source inputs and feeds them through Carson McDonald's opensource live_segmenter and tools to generate MPEG-2 Transport Stream segements and related extended M3U playlists.
• Developed multi-language news gathering platform to aggregate feeds from news agencies: Xinhua News Agency, Reuters, AP, AFP and others to provide a central resource for RFA's editorial staff. Includes ingest of disparate feed sources via FTP, IMAP, RSS, NewsML, along with advanced multilanguage search and features such highlighting of search terms in paged results. Python language, with Sphinx documentation, and MySQL backend.

Verizon Business (MCI Communications)

Sr. Network & Software Engineer, Global Data Network Management

• Serve as a member of the IP Tier 3 Network Operations Center (NOC), responsible for global IP backbone operations for Verizon Business' (formerly MCI/UUNET), public IP backbone network; one of nine IP Tier 1 networks.
• Serve as the group's network software engineer, developing software for network management, monitoring, reporting, analysis and automation including:
  • Analysis and automated update of existing MPLS LSP bandwidth contracts (30,000 paths) for large networks (AS701 - North America and Canada, AS702 - Europe, AS703 - Asia Pacific) for transit traffic optimization.
  • Provide automation for all large scale, including global, network updates for: protocol changes (BGP, ISIS, MPLS), access list updates, authentication, routing policy, standards compliance monitoring, router OS upgrade deployment, and others.
  • Automate analysis of routing problems that are difficult to diagnose manually, such as those which require multiple simultaneous connections to routers with precise timing information correlated to events and debugging information, an example being 'receive side buffering' conditions on the Cisco platforms.
  • Automate configuration and testing of high density aggregation hardware such as the Cisco Blizzard and Frostbite line-cards. Automated configuration of controllers, and BERT and loopback testing.
  • Provide software for global network monitoring and analysis, along with current and historical reporting (Web, MySQL, RRDTool) on network statistics including router and line-card CPU and memory utilization, network latency/SLAs, and automated detection of known anomalies to support quick response, or proactive intervention.
  • Develop tools for automated router-config generation and modification to support network upgrades, maintenance, and grooming, including large scale customer moves onto higher density hardware, full router chassis migrations (Juniper M160 to T640 moves), quality assurance of configurations, BGP and MPLS/LSP meshing/de-meshing of newly deployed and decommissioned hardware respectively, and related efforts.
  • Provide consultation to in-house IT groups on internal applications closely related to network operations, such as those systems for network configuration management.
• Perform various roles, on a rotational basis, with other members of the IP Tier3 organization, and engage in a more dedicated roles for some longer term projects of the group, which has the ultimate responsibility for operations of the company's global IP network, and handles escalations that cannot be resolved by the Customer Support Technical Assistance Center (CTAC), and the Tier 2 NOC staff. Examples include:
  • Work hand-in-hand with Global Data Network Engineering for design, planning, analysis and field verification (FVO) of routing hardware, router OS software, and router configuration implementations as well as problem resolution of complex routing issues at the nexus of operations and engineering.
  • Perform all customer impacting (L1) maintenance on public IP network devices primarily consisting of Juniper and Cisco routers, FORE ATM switches, and Lucent Frame-Relay switches.
  • Define maintenance procedures and develop, document and update Maintenance Operating Procedure (MOPS) documentation for operating procedures that are utilized for all network maintenance performed by Tier2/3 NOC personnel.
  • Perform quality assurance assessment of hardware and software configuration of all new network devices prior to activation.
  • Review all network maintenance requests (approximately 70 daily), to ensure planned physical and logical configuration changes are sound, proper designation of network and/or customer impact and notifications are indicated, proper procedures are indicated, and that redundancy or other network elements will not be compromised or adversely effected when unnecessary.
  • Involvement in planning, and design related to major initiatives as well of deployment and management of the design for projects such as the voice over IP (VOIP) backbone (currently converting 1 million minutes per month from traditional phone infrastructure to IP), and Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) related network upgrades to support lawful intercept of network traffic by enforcement agencies.

Zope Corporation

Senior UNIX Administrator

• Deployment and management of a high-availability, high-volume (20-50+ million Web requests daily) managed hosting environment for customers including Viacom (cbsnewyork.com, cbs2chicago.com, many other media properties), Knight-Ridder, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Design, deployment, and management of load-balancing, redundancy/failover, reverse proxy, caching, security, storage, and data backup/recovery components of this environment as well as related performance management and monitoring systems.
• Administration of several hundred enterprise and managed hosting systems; primarily Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with some Windows (2000/XP), FreeBSD UNIX, and Windows virtual machines on Linux (VMware).
• Design and deployment of systems supporting automated network operating systems installs (PXE boot/DHCP/systemimager), and rapid deployment and/or recreation of machines based on class, functional purpose, or specific purpose, along with class based (cache, app, storage server), or machine specific automated software installation and configuration including deterministic ordering of post OS imaging changes to a desired, or previously known-to-be-good state.
• Configuration and Management of systems and networks including mail (SMTP/POP/IMAP - Sendmail, Postfix, UCE controls(SPAM)), DHCP, DNS (Bind 9), Cisco 2950 LAN switches, Cisco 2611 series routers, Networking/NAT, Wireless Access, Secure Shell/public/private key access, VLAN, VPN, Firewall/netfilter/iptables, CVS version control, Web Servers (Zope/Apache), Nagios/LogWatch/syslog systems monitoring, database servers (ZODB, MySQL, PostGreSQL), LDAP (OpenLDAP), and Voice over IP/Asterisk software PBX.
• Conversion of the company's Alcatel digital phone system to the free, OpenSource Asterisk software based PBX, and VoIP phones, providing a dramatic reduction in capital equipment costs, long distance and conferencing charges, and elimination of a $5,000 annual service contract.
• Designed creative solutions for systems administration such as modifying the OpenSSH server to retreive public keys via the HTTPS protocol allow for easy administration and control of access to network systems via the presence of public key files at a given URL (See: sshd PKI, as well as developing an IP billing platform based on the Linux Virtual Server (LVS)).

The Washington Post

Web Infrastructure and Deployment Engineer

• Responsibility for deployment and management of Web infrastructure components for all Web based Applications at the Washington Post newspaper (3000 users/systems). Management of Novell iChain reverse proxy, caching appliance including integration with the clustered Novell LDAP based eDirectory, and TCP traffic load balancing via Cisco Local Directors and later Cisco Content Switches, along with WebLogic application clustering integration via Apache/IIS I/ASAPI plug-ins primarily for J2EE based applications.
• Responsibility for AAA security implementation via the iChain/eDirectory components for access and performance management for all internal and external Web applications including the Washington Post Online Classifieds (50,000 users with 1,000 new users per week), Microsoft Active Directory/Windows integration, PeopleSoft HR and Corporate Meta-Directory integration (Affiliated companies i.e. Kaplan/Newsweek Interactive), CCI Web access (electronic publishing), Lotus Notes (e-mail/groupware), the Advertising Portal, eTearsheets, Kintana (Time tracking), and others.
• Extensive in-depth responsibility for deployment, configuration and management of Web infrastructure systems including hardware installation (Dell/Compaq), OS installation and configuration (Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2000 Workstation, Netware, Linux, AIX), iChain in a cluster configuration on Netware, eDirectory in a cluster configuration on Win2K, Apache 1.3/2.0 on UNIX and Windows, networking, routing and load balancing via iChain/Cisco configuration and integration, extensive LDAP directory deployment and management via ConsoleOne/iManager, OpenLDAP tools, and custom programming with Perl/Java/PHP, database deployment and integration (MySQL/Oracle), and extensive problem solving and troubleshooting of Web application technologies in this environment including TCP/IP and related protocols (SMTP/FTP/POP), HTTP 1.0/1.1 (Headers/Cookies/Sessions w/Failover/SSL/Auth), JavaScript, Java/WebLogic integration, LDAP, HTML, XML, CSS and related.

UUNET Technologies / WorldCom

Sr. Internet Systems Software Engineer

• Broad responsibility for wide ranging, multi-platform (UNIX/Windows) Web and enterprise applications and systems supporting operational deployment and management of a global Internet backbone.
• Provided technical leadership and consulted with management and staff on current and emerging technologies and innovative and successful approaches for delivering large value through information technology.
• Lead, train, support and mentor a team of developers (4 - 12) and analysts in development, systems, analytic methods and effective business processes.
• Developed many systems that delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, increased efficiency and/or revenue generation, and several delivering millions of dollars in value each.
• Responsibility for design, development and implementation of numerous large scale, production Web applications, portals, and related systems, including extensive integration with large operational database systems and enterprise applications covering functional areas including customer portals, network monitoring, configuration, automation, performance, and management; customer billing, traffic engineering, capacity and strategic planning, SLAs, executive reporting on network capacity and utilization for all network traffic, circuit ordering and management, provisioning, and configuration, systems and asset management.
• Hands-on lead design, development, and implementation of many key applications, database systems, and high value automation
• Sophisticated Intranet Websites for Network Planning and Implementation, Capacity and Strategic Planning, Network Design, Network Provisioning, Network Coordination, Backbone Test and Acceptance, Quality Systems Management, Network CAD, Global Program Management. (Solaris, Windows, Apache/IIS, Perl, PHP, CGI, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Java, Sybase ASE, Oracle, SQL, MS-Access)
• Marketing Web prototypes for new products and systems.
• Optical Circuit (SONET) test and acceptance tool suite for testing all OC/DS3 backbone circuits. FORE ATM switches.
• Backbone/Peering Circuit Management application
• Voice over IP (VoIP) Quality Engineering System for route suitability, SLA and SLA baseline, monitoring, troubleshooting of the company’s VoIP products. SIP, RTP, Cisco VoIP MIB, RTR responder.
• Automated DSL provisioning tool suite
• Automated Customer Network Design application
• Automated Customer Edge migration suite for migrating 22,000 T1 customers to a newer Cisco 12008/Lucent CBX500 platform

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/ Boeing, Washington, DC.

Systems Management Analyst

• Lead systems management responsibility for a large heterogeneous enterprise network and related systems. 2,500 Windows, Macintosh (700), Novell, and UNIX systems.
• Advise management and staff on methods and systems for effective systems and configuration management.
• Implement and manage Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), Norton Administrator for Networks for hardware and software inventory, automated software distribution, and configuration management, analysis and reporting.
• Provide systems management supporting the migration of all 2,000+ desktop and server systems. WFW3.11 to Win98 and MacOS upgrade on the desktop, and Novell to WinNT server farm in the back office.
• Designed and developed NHQIS, the NASA headquarters multi-platform, unified systems management analysis and reporting system for integrating systems management information from disparate systems management applications. (Visual FoxPro for Windows/Mac)
• Designed and developed custom TCP/IP clients and servers for systems inventory and configuration management.
• Designed and developed dynamic Web and MS-Access front ends for analysis and reporting of systems management information from Microsoft SMS / MS-SQL Server

Residential / Commercial Construction and Development

• Residential remodeling and electric construction, as well as some commercial construction
• Computer systems management and support for several small firms
• Active in personal computing with Windows, Linux, and Internet including learning new languages such as Perl and HTML, as well as various Internet Protocols including NNTP, SMTP, HTTP.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Martin Marietta/UNISYS, Washington, DC

Systems Analyst / Network Administrator

• Plan, deploy, manage and administer Local Area Networks (LANs) and related enterprise desktop systems as part of a unified computing environment consisting of 110 Novell networks, and mainframe and minicomputer resources.
• Implement and manage several Novell LANs (300-500 end users), along with support of related desktop systems and software as part of a large, multi-tiered support organization with a centralized help desk.
• Manage servers and database systems including the National Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) database management system.
• Develop custom applications, and innovative software for systems inventory, mainframe connectivity, data transfer and printing, and cc:Mail post office synchronization before commercial solution was available.
• Conducted formal and informal training, including course preparation.

L.E. Peabody and Associates

Economic Analyst

• Develop computer models and systems for economic modeling of transportation systems supporting successful litigation ($100M+) before the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), now the Surface Transportation Board (STB).
• Develop financial (discounted cash flow), engineering, and operational models of transportation systems and integrate and optimize these models into unified economic modeling suite supporting rapid analysis of various economic approaches to litigation.
• Conduct studies that utilize various formulas employed by the STB in the development of costs for common carriers, including the Uniform Railroad Costing System (URCS) formula.
• Extensive analysis in the area of stand-alone costing (Staggers Rail Act), including route layout, design, and construction costs as well as detailed operating plans for various stand-alone railroads